Anybody else remember Gene Rodennberry’s Earth- Final Conflict? It was (in my opinion of course) a really great show until it severely jumped the shark at the end of (I think) the fourth season. EFC had a fallen USSR. The Russian mafia was left after the government collapsed. They were briefly the de facto government. Then, they installed themselves as the permanent government.
Of course in a world without Taylon visitors, we got Putin instead. So, EFC wasn’t far off. I enjoyed their prediction of the future and the Russian mafia seizing control always struck me as plausible.
RE Sliderules
I have a few my dad left me. I have never learned to use one due to lack of an instructor and the fear I’ll be unable to understand the procedure.
Oh, ye of little education (at least as far as Verne goes)…
Verne did get a lot of things wrong, but it’s pretty impressive the number of things he got surprisingly right. I’ve written about a few of them over the years. I’ll only mention one here – the aeronef – his heavier-than-air flying machine in Robur the Conqueror was built of composites – not wood or bamboo or even aluminum (which he correctly used for his space ship in From the Earth to the Moon) , but what are without-a-doubt composite materials. And he used them for the right reason – they had great strength combined with extremely light weight. In 1886. At least three quarters of a century before anyone actually did this.
We’re in the midst of what I think of as the “third Verne Renaissance”, with several new translations of Verne into English, and the very first publications and translations of them since Verne’s lifetime. People certainly are reading Verne, even after all these years. For the first time since his lifetime, you can buy all of his books in new editions.
I just missed slide rules - though I eventually got some (a friend of mine was given the assignment in junior high math class to do a presentation about slide rules, and since he couldn’t make heads or tails out of the instructions and slide rule he had, he came to me for help. First thing I told him was “This is not a slide rule” - this is an English to metric converter (something like this
Fair enough, I hadn’t read it in decades, and thought I remembered it was actually a hollow Earth setting.
But, after brushing up with the wikipedia entry, there still aren’t caves of that sort of magnitude anywhere, much less miles below active volcanos, much less passageways that lead even further down, eventually coming out through a different volcano.
He wasn’t as wrong as I thought, but he still got quite a bit wrong.
Point being, it’s not about what he got wrong, it’s whether he told a good story in the process, and I, and I think you, and I think many millions of others think he did.
I’ll admit that everything was hyperbole, and he was quite a good future prognosticator in many respects.
But he still got quite a bit wrong about science, technology, and the future. Point being, what he got wrong doesn’t detract from the story.
Anyway, back to the OP… As I was watching the Got-Junk people remove my old 36 inch TV from my basement last night, I realized that we were still using vacuum tubes in televisions up until pretty recently with the proliferation of various flat screen technologies. Up until the 70s and 80s, televisions had quite a number of vacuum tubes in them, I remember watching the TV repairman replace them from time to time in my parent’s TV when I was a child. But pushing into even the early aughts, most TVs still had at least one.
The idea of having vacuum tubes in an I/O device, even a psionic one, and having finicky tubes that would blow and need replacing, would have been something familiar to audiences for a number of decades after he wrote the story.
We knew that Jupiter didn’t have a surface, much less life on that surface, and that psionics was bunk science long before we stopped using vacuum tubes. Really, the vacuum tubes in that story is the least dated reference in it.
I “reread” it a while ago on an audiobook, and was kind of surprised to find that in the beginning Professor Lidenbrock acknowledges that most people thought his journey would be impossible due to the immense pressures and temperatures, but he had a theory (proved correct in the book) which made it feasible. So Verne knew the science, but chose to violate it for the story. And acknowledged it in the book. Nothing wrong with that at all.
Yeah, I only remembered the slide rule part. It was weirder than I thought.
And in a “we live in the future” vein, I found it easier to search for the cover to review it online, despite the fact that the magazine with the cover is about two feet from my computer. But it is behind some other ASFs, and would take longer to get to.
I’ve downloaded most of the 40s and 50s science fiction magazines from archive.org so that I don’t even have to search there a second time. Talk about at your fingertips!
If anyone would like to see the vast gulf between known and unknown technology (with a sidebar of odd (to us) projected history), dig up Fritz Leiber’s The Creature from the Cleveland Depths where, while getting wrong the probable history of nuclear war, he posits an amazing take on the way that social media technology will affect daily living while putting the supporting technology in massive, back-killing hardware.
@Little_Nemo, I think you hit on something about the “gee whiz” factor: if you look at the colorful covers of old sci-fi magazines like Amazing Stories, you’ll see lots of enormous, glowing glass tubes that were inspired by vacuum tubes, chemistry flasks, and/or other science-y glassware that was considered “cool” at the time.
More importantly, such technology was relatable to the public. Lay people of the 1950s might not have understood how vacuum tubes worked, but they certainly had seen the innards of radios and TVs, and were familiar enough to know that these glowing glass tubes were at work and got the job done (ie, they made TVs and radios function).
Transistors, on the other hand, were opaque–not only figuratively, but literally. Even if you had seen one (which would’ve been unlikely during the 1950s) all you’d have seen was something that resembled an itsy-bitsy metal can…which may have disappeared in the crowd of components clustered around it (unlike vacuum tubes, which stood out like towers).
I always thought it was hilarious, in movies of the 1990s, when someone would send an email and the message typed on their monitor would suddenly become animated, fold up like a sheet of paper, fly into a cartoon envelope that would seal itself, and then zip off the side of the screen with a whoosh–all so that the audience could understand what was going on. These are the sorts of things we look back on and laugh at, but they were considered reasonable storytelling techniques in their respective times.
I’ve got Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land on audio, and re-listen to it frequently. One of the weirdest things is the way he describes sending “instant” messages in the future depicted by the book. There are apparently chains of messaging places, like the old telegraph offices, where you can send a message. You write or type it out, it gets photographed, and the photograph gets electronically sent to either your house or some other message store.
If it’s going to be somehow “zapped” across town or the country, evidently the scanner is too big, bulky, and expensive for individuals to own. That actually describes the state of the art of what we’d later call faxing when he wrote it (and for about a century before – sending facsimiles over wire is an older technology than the telephone), but Heinlein was the Master of Extrapolation. You’d think he’d have anticipated home fax machines, if not e-mail. (For that matter, the 1980s Back to the Future II didn’t do much better, imag8ining that faxes would be the main method of sending text messages in 2015, less than thirty years in the future.)
This is very reasonable and quite common. I have dual monitors because I have several applications that need to work together, and constantly dropping and popping up screens is annoying. Were I working with tablets, I’d be using two for sure.
Not science fiction, but purported to be predictive of the future, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged seemed to think that passenger trains were the best long-distance travel vehicle and would be for a long time.
When AS was first published in 1957, there were propeller-driven transcontinental airlines already and passenger jet planes were on the rather obvious horizon. Trans-Atlantic commercial flights were a reality by 1958. Yet Rand’s biggest airplanes were crop duster sized and little more than novelties. I’ve never figured out why she thought this.
Probably just a plot device: The heroine is later offered a chance to build a narrow-gauge mining railroad in “the valley of the strikers”. It wouldn’t have worked with an airline. There’s the scene where the hobo is about to be thrown off of the train. And the scene where the rail system has to revert to manual control in order to keep the trains moving after the signal system breaks down.
Or…It was a comment on the state of the railroads in the late 1950’s. From Ayn Rand’s viewpoint, it would have been an example of government control (the Interstate Commerce Commission) of a vital industry.
Or…Well, there were those jokes about the film “The Fountainhead” and the effect upon Dominique when she saw Howard Roark’s wielding the jackhammer. Maybe the train was unconsciously another phallic symbol.
I KNEW I should have read the Wikipedia page about Atlas Shrugged before posting.
Emphasis added and links removed…
“Rand began the first draft of the novel on September 2, 1946 She initially thought it would be easy to write and completed quickly, but as she considered the complexity of the philosophical issues she wanted to address, she realized it would take longer. After ending a contract to write screenplays for [Hal Wallis] and finishing her obligations for the film adaptation of The Fountainhead , Rand was able to work full-time on the novel that she tentatively titled The Strike . By the summer of 1950, she had written 18 chapters, by September 1951, she had written 21 chapters and was working on the last of the novel’s three sections.”